SIAI President Michael Vassar and SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel recently had short articles published in Forbes magazine’s online AI Report. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Michael Vassar’s article:

Are you in a city? If so, may I ask you to look around? Almost everything you see was created deliberately. Human minds built theories and implemented plans. Due to these plans, rocks were gathered, shaped and rearranged. You call some of these rocks your house. The main things that weren’t created deliberately are the minds themselves.

Humans are primarily natural, not designed. Human culture shapes personal development, but on an absolute scale culture permits only a very narrow range of possibilities. A human can be raised to be an Inca, a teacher or a psychoanalyst. More careful upbringing and good luck can produce a Mozart, an Einstein or a Julius Caesar, but never a dolphin, a raven or an elephant. Michael Phelps is astounding for a human, but a dolphin can cross an Olympic pool in seconds.

Continue Michael’s article here, or read Ben’s article here.

The Singularity Institute has partnered with American Airlines to get discounts on airfare for Summit attendees. When booking air travel on www.aa.com, use the promotional code “8899AR” to get a 5% discount on flights to and from the Summit from anywhere in the world. Offer is only valid for travel to and from New York City between Wednesday, September 30th and Wednesday, October 7th.

The New York Times just ran an article on the concepts that the Singularity Summit has been a leading conference in exploring: the Singularity, intelligence explosion, and the possibility of artificial intelligence outsmarting humans.  The article is by John Markoff, who wrote a prior article on the Singularity, “The Coming Superbrain”, just two months ago, which profiled Singularity Summit speaker Ray Kurzweil.  Here is an excerpt from the latest article:

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

Read the entire article.

It is good to see discussion around both the risks and benefits of advanced AI technologies.  Both are greater than many people think.

With three months to go before the 2009 Singularity Summit, we are pleased to announce the preliminary speaker line-up.  The event is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, October 3rd-4th at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City, New York.  Tickets are now available for sale at the Singularity Summit website.

See the schedule here. The schedule may be updated as details are finalized.